Baptized into the New Age

John Dunnill (Body and Sacrifice, 128-9) argues that for Paul baptism is more than a “sign” of the new age: “For him, resurrection is the actual transformation of the mortal body of Jesus, the reversal of the deathward trend established by Adam: not merely the resuscitation of a dead body but a change in his mode of being human which begins with death and moves outward into life. Baptism, which he understands as a symbolic death, is the mode of entry into this new order, a transformation which begins during mortal life and reaches beyond physical death into eschatological and eternal living. It is the necessary transformation of the nature of humanity if it to be able to share in the divine glory.”

Thus, “the redeemed body is essentially different.” Empirically, the redeemed body looks the same as everybody else’s; it is not even as “different” as the circumcised body of the Jew or the tattooed body of the tribesman or Roman soldier. Christians have “common” bodies. 

Yet within this common flesh, Paul says, something else is working: “the Christian body is impelled by Holy Spirit which leads it away from the one whose sarx was so transformed as to live after death as a ‘spiritual body’ . . . subject to the dominion of neither death nor sin . . . living in direct relation to the source of life, God. What was true absolutely of Christ is true relatively of all others, in whom the Spirit of God and the Adamic flesh co-exist in tension.”